Introduction

What is the Ganesha project?

My name is James Nash and I am a Computer Science student at Warwick University. I have developed an easy to use RDF editor as my 3. year Project. The finished program is now available for download. Please give it a try!

The Ganesha project will be moved to Sourceforge (or a similar service) soon to continue its development as an open-source project. This website will remain available as a resource for future students doing similar projects so that they can (hopefully) learn from my mistakes - the mark awarded to this project was 64%! :(

So what's an RDF editor for?

RDF (Resource Description Framework) is a standard for publishing meta-data, that's descriptive data about other data, for virtually anything. This is especially useful for the World Wide Web since it allows people to describe things like web pages, pictures, videos, etc. in way that computers can make sense of. The more we can tell computers about bits of data and how they are related the more they can help us work with that data.

An obvious use is making search engines that can provide more relevant results and are not just limited to indexing textual data. But in theory one could also make software that automatically finds financial data on the web, analyses it and produces a report. Or software that automatically finds and compiles collections of artworks by a given artist. The possibilities are endless. See the W3C's Semantic Web site for more info.

The key to making all this happen though is actually having comprehensive, machine-readable meta-data out there on the Web. Sadly, although RDF has been around for a few years now, it is not yet widely used. Especially small to medium websites that are often created and maintained by individuals don't make use of RDF.

That's where Ganesha comes in. Ganesha will aim to provide an easy to use, graphical interface for creating RDF data (encoded as XML). Hopefully, just like WYSIWYG HTML editors brought web page creation to the masses, so will Ganesha help RDF achieve widespread adoption.